Re-imagining the Past

Antiquity and Modern Greek Culture

Edited by Dimitris Tziovas

Description

Antiquity has often been perceived as the source of Greece's modern achievements, as well as its frustrations, with the continuity between ancient and modern Greek culture and the legacy of classical Greece in Europe dominating and shaping current perceptions of the classical past.

By moving beyond the dominant perspectives on the Greek past, this edited volume shifts attention to the ways this past has been constructed, performed, (ab)used, Hellenized, canonized, and ultimately decolonized and re-imagined. For the contributors, re-imagining the past is an opportunity to critically examine and engage imaginatively with various approaches. Chapters explore both the role of antiquity in texts and established cultural practices and its popular, material and everyday uses, charting the transition in the study of the reception of antiquity in modern Greek culture from an emphasis on the continuity of the past to the recognition of its diversity.

Incorporating a number of chapters which adopt a comparative perspective, the volume re-imagines Greek antiquity and invites the reader to look at the different uses and articulations of the past both in and outside Greece, ranging from literature to education, and from politics to photography.

Re-imagining the Past

Antiquity and Modern Greek Culture

Edited by Dimitris Tziovas

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations Notes on Contributors 1. Introduction: decolonizing antiquity, heritage politics and performing the past, Dimitris TziovasPart I: Antiquity, Greece, and Europe 2. Collecting the past: Greek antiquaries and archaeological knowledge in the Venetian Empire, Anastasia Stouraiti3. Re-imagining Greek antiquity in 1821: Shelley's Hellas in its literary and political context, Roderick Beaton4. A syncretic antiquity in translation: polis and political modernity in conflict in nineteenth-century Greek Antigones, Alexandra LianeriPart II: Hellenisms, Institutions, and Politics 5. Antique names and self-identification: Hellenes, Graikoi and Romaioi from late Byzantium to the Greek nation-state, Tassos A. Kaplanis6. The Christian Hellenism and linguistic archaism of Neofytos Doukas, Peter Mackridge7. The University of Athens and Greek antiquity (1837-1937), Vangelis Karamanolakis8. Antiquity as cold war propaganda: the political uses of the classical past in post-civil war Greece, Alexander KazamiasPart III: Material Culture and Performance 9. Dead archaeologists, buried gods: archaeology as an agent of modernity in Greece, Dimitris Plantzos10. In the spirit of matter: re-connecting to antiquity in the Greek present, Eleana Yalouri11. Postcards from Metaxas' Greece: the uses of classical antiquity in tourism photography, Katerina Zacharia12. Between texts and contexts: moderns against ancients in the reception of ancient tragedy in Greece (1900-1933), Eleni PapazoglouPart IV: Literary Receptions of Antiquity 13. Sin and the City: a mid-fifteenth-century lament for the fall of Athens to the 'Persians', Gonda Van Steen14. Lucretian moments in modern Greek poetry, David Ricks15. Rethinking the Greek Legacy: Dorians in modern Greek fiction, Gunnar de Boel16. Yannis Ritsos, Marxist dialectics and the re-imagining of Ancient Greece, Marinos Pourgouris17. The wound of history: Ritsos and the reception of Philoctetes, Dimitris Tziovas18. Plato, Seferis and Heaney: poetry as redress, Rowena FowlerPart V: Greek Culture and Classical Reception 19. Exceptionalities and paradigms: ancient and modern Greek culture in classical reception research, LornaHardwickBibliographyIndex